The last few months I was very busy finishing my bachelor’s degree (it’s over, I got an “A”!). But still, I’ve managed to do some cool stuff and improve the engine structure and tools in the last couple of months.

This dev log will be released in two parts. In this part I’m going to talk about game stuff I did and stuff I changed about Lua/C++ integration. In the second part I’ll talk about engine tools I’ve made with ImGui and different refactoring I’ve done.

Game stuff

Here’s one of the latest screenshots of the game. Houses were previously just big sprites, but right now they’re composed out of tiles which lets me reuse them for other houses and build new buildings more quickly.

Last two months were pretty awesome. I had lots of free time and was able to implement lots of new stuff!

Recreation mechanic

Let’s start with a gameplay gif:

It’s another example of recreation mechanic.
For those who don’t know, recreation mechanic is the main mechanic in my game. When undead hero kills people, he can leave his body and control dead people with his ghost. He gains their abilities to progress through the game and solve various puzzles. But he can’t leave his body behind for a long time because he can’t carry the hammer while controlling other people. The hammer can do some stuff which normal weapons can’t. (break some floors, for example)
This hammer is very heavy so he can’t carry other weapons. So, for example, in order to shoot arrows, you need to kill archers and control them with your ghost.
He can also use his ghost to reach inaccessible areas. But this won’t be very useful if there are no corpses lying there because he won’t be able to interact with the world this way. But it has another use: you can look around and see what you have to deal with next. This will be very helpful when solving complex puzzles.

This month was great. I finally got in the flow of development and managed to get lots of things done. I worked hard to make game look better and here’s the result. Compare old screens with new screens:

A long time has passed since I’ve written the last dev log! Is Re:creation dead? Is it stagnating? No, not at all. It’s more alive than ever now!
I haven’t written a new part of dev log because I had to study a lot in December and January. I had some time to develop some stuff during these month and had a lot of stuff done in February.
I’ve decided to write the dev log in two forms

First one will be about the features I’ve implemented recently and it will have a lot of pretty screenshots and gifs. (You’re reading this part right now).

Second one will be more specific and I’ll focus more on technical parts of the game and implementation details of some interesting features. This part is a lot harder to write so it’ll be less frequent than the first one.If you’re wondering about how I’ve implemented one or another feature of the game or its engine, feel free to write an email and ask about it! I’m always glad to answer.

I did a lot of stuff this month and I’ll start with the most important thing.
I’m ready to present the core game mechanic in the game!

Recreation

I call this mechanic “recreation“. Here’s how it works.

First, you kill someone

Then you can become a ghost and travel around the screen without taking any damage and colliding with anything

You can’t get too far away from your body though!

When you are in the ghost form you can become the enemy you just killed

It gets revived in the zombie form. You don’t have many health in this form so you can’t complete an entire level like that, you’re most likely to die. When you die, you return to your original body.

This mechanic is used to solve puzzles and progress forward. Each enemy will have unique skills which will help you on your way.
Here’s an example of solving a simple puzzle.

I have some other puzzles but I can’t show them right now because they need to be polished! I also don’t want to spoil too much for people who read my dev logs.
There are lots of puzzles which can be invented with this mechanic and I’m really excited to work on puzzles involved it!

Re:creation is a hobby gamedev project being made by Elias Daler. Re:creation is an action adventure game inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Earthbound.

You play as an undead knight who can become people he kills and get their abilities to progress in the game and solve various puzzles using unique recreation mechanic which can be summarized in this gif: